Bad Company

Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

De: Megan Greenwell

Narrado por: Dan Bittner

*ONE OF AV CLUB'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025*

""[An] indictment of an industry that has cannily tilted the playing field in its favor. Bad Company details how clichéd abstractions like ‘consolidation’ and ‘efficiency’ have given cover to real betrayals.” - The New York Times

A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.

Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.

Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country’s most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.

Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.

In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.

©2025 Megan Greenwell (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

Never knew how Private Equity firms worked.

Broken down for people that did not understand how these firms work. Thank you, Megan.

The healthcare story was great

At times it seemed to be fitting facts to a narrative rather than trying to acknowledge nuance

Lots of filler with interesting points now and then.

This book was filler. Lots of personal stories and details about people that really didn’t get to the point. It’s well written. It’s sometimes interesting. I wish the editor would’ve cut out half the book.

It was well presented with a decent explanation of how PE firms typically function once they’ve become involved in a business.

I really enjoyed the explanations of the loopholes and leveraged strategies used by PE firms. There is a heavy amount of detailed exposition about each main character’s life which felt like it was added to stretch the length of the story. Overall I enjoyed the book and feel it is a good listen especially if your company has been added to a PE firm’s portfolio.

Very informative

There were things that I already knew but I also knew that I didn't know enough PE firms. This was really well written, I love the stories.
I definitely recommend it.

Finding solutions

I enjoyed starting to understand how private equity can be rewarded and present themselves to influence negatively those they employ and serve. I appreciate that the book addressed what has been done to counteract the destabilizing influence, in the lives of workers, in the instances the book identifies where business ownership became private equity.

Cliches and oversimplified conclusions

The shallow analysis, the overuse of hyperbole, the lack of context and the baseless conclusions. Aside from that, how was the play Mrs Lincoln